0

Toronto-based Aislelabs wants retailers to be able to see the path of their customers, from the macro level right down to their in-store experience, using a combination of technologies include GPS, Wi-Fi and Beacon proximity information. To help with that, the startup has raised an initial $1.5 million in funding from IAF, Rho Ventures, Salesforce and a number of angel investors.

Like others interested in retail analytics, Aislelabs founder Nick Koudas and Nilesh Bansal both believed that traditional retailers were being left behind by online shopkeepers, who have seen their ability to track, analyze and act on visitor behavior evolve considerably over time. To help bridge the gap, the startup uses machine learning to inform two platforms for retailers, AislelabsFlow and AislelabsEngage. Flow delivers retailers insight on their shoppers’ behavior, while Engage delivers real-time messages and emails to customers, personalized as needed based on their observed behavior.

“We can use multiple technologies for behavioural targeting,” Koudas said in an interview. “We can use GPS, Wi-Fi and also Beacons inside the store. We can target everyone from the city level, down to the store level, down to the individual aisles inside the store, and we can localize within a couple of feet with Beacons. It’s a true end-to-end platform for retailers with multiple locations.”

That means you can do sophisticated retargeting for customers that are promising but don’t necessarily result in a conversion, just like you would on the web, but over a geographic span for brick-and-mortar shopping instead. It’s a proposition with a lot of power, and particularly for the larger chain retailers that Aislelabs is targeting first as its primary customer demographic.

Aislelabs takes into account data points beyond the stores themselves including weather, population, age distribution and more, and factors that into the data it gathers from shoppers. The founders previously built Sysomos, the social media monitoring platform that was acquired by Marketwire in 2010, so they have experience processing huge amounts of data and deriving from that useful insights for brands. There may be many companies chasing the carrot of retail data, but Aislelabs looks to be one of the most comprehensive solutions out there, and one of those with the most data smarts behind its platform, too.